


A Flower Trying to Bloom in Snow

by destroythemeek



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-30
Updated: 2011-08-30
Packaged: 2017-10-29 04:12:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destroythemeek/pseuds/destroythemeek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An afternoon of baking between two women who've known loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Flower Trying to Bloom in Snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Catw00man](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catw00man/gifts).



> Written for catw00man for the fma_ladyfest at LJ. Title from "The Tower," by Vienna Teng. Many, many thanks to likeadeuce, for beta and unending hand-holding. My recipient wanted to know more about Gracia, and I hope I've provided!

“Mama, Mama, the mail!”

Elysia bolted toward the door like a streak of pigtailed lightning, only tripping a little as her stocking feet skidded across the polished wood floor. It was her favorite part of the day. At a few months shy of four years old she hadn’t yet been assigned any major household chores, but retrieving the day’s post from the mail slot had become her daily duty. And like all Hughes men and women, she took duty very seriously.

Gracia Hughes followed her daughter to the door and accepted the stack of envelopes Elysia solemnly passed her way. “Thank you very much, sweetheart. You can go back to your puzzle now.”

Elysia scampered away, energy unflagging, and Gracia begin sorting through the mail. A letter from her sister in the North, the water bill, the monthly newsletter from the All-Amestrian Recipe Club, a subscription renewal notice from the Central City Times… nothing in the pile was surprising. And least surprising of all were the two envelopes at the bottom of the stack, envelopes stuffed with money and sealed with guilt: her larger-than-standard monthly widow’s stipend from the Amestrian military, and her monthly gift from Roy Mustang.

Gracia sighed, as she always did, and put the envelopes down on the hall table next to the telephone, as she always did. Tomorrow she would take one fourth of the money to the bank where she worked and deposit it into Elysia’s college fund. The other three-fourths she’d deposit into her own account, where they’d be transformed by the magic of a personal check into a donation to the Fund for Amestrian War Orphans. Gracia Hughes was a practical woman who could not, entirely, look a gift horse in the mouth. But Elysia still had one parent, and that parent was perfectly capable of supporting her daughter without the material assistance of those in search of redemption.

The mail sorted, Gracia turned toward the kitchen, where she'd begun to set out the tools and ingredients for her Saturday afternoon baking. But before she had a chance to move, a knock came at the door, a rapid succession of taps from a deceptively strong hand. Her guest had arrived early.

Hearing the knock, Elysia raced back down the hall, trailing puzzle pieces behind her like breadcrumbs, and as soon as Gracia opened the door her daughter leaped into the visitor's expectant arms.

“Winry!”

Winry Rockbell giggled, picking up Elysia with both hands and balancing her on her hip. “Hey, there, Ellie! How's my little sister doing?”

Elysia beamed, cuddling closer to Winry and wrapping her small arms around the older girl's neck. “I'm making a puzzle!”

Winry sneaked a glance down the hall, her eyes resting on the jigsaw squares scattered across the wood. “I can see that! But you're gonna lose your pieces if you keep dropping them all over. Why don't you show me what a big girl you are and go pick those up? Then you can finish your puzzle and tell me all about it.”

“Ok!” Winry lowered her to the ground and Elysia began her trek down the hall, dutifully stopping to pick up each puzzle piece along the way.

“Hi, Mrs. Hughes,” Winry said, straightening her shirt over the hip where Elysia had rested. “Sorry I didn't say that before! Your little girl is just so adorable that I forget all my manners.”

Gracia smiled and pulled Winry into a warm hug of greeting. “She does have that effect on people.” It was one of the many things Elysia had inherited from her father: the ability to utterly command the attention of everyone in a room, sometimes against their will. “And please, call me Gracia.”

Winry smiled politely in a way that signaled she was never going to acquiesce to that particular request. “How are things here? I swear Elysia looks more grown up every time I see her.”

Gracia nodded, taking Winry's windblown scarf and coat and hanging them on the rack by the door. It was a cold Central City autumn, foreshadowing a frigid winter to come. “She's growing like a weed, I swear. I've had to let down the hems on her dresses twice this year already.”

“Wow!” Winry's big eyes practically glowed. “Soon enough she'll be as tall as I am. Or at least as tall as Granny.” She giggled softly, as if at a private joke. “I don't want to know how Ed will react when Elysia's taller than he is.”

Gracia led Winry toward the kitchen, past the room where Elysia was hard at work on her puzzle. “How is your Granny? You've just come from a visit to Resembool, haven't you?”

These were the safe questions: asking about Elysia, asking about Pinako Rockbell. The young and the old, those with settled lives of safety and comfort. Gracia didn't ask Winry about the Elric brothers, off on yet another dangerous adventure. Winry didn’t ask about Gracia’s grief for her husband, less than a year in the grave. An afternoon of baking didn’t call for those kinds of questions.

“Oh, she’s fine,” Winry said, poking through the ingredients Gracia had set out on the counter. “She misses me, you know, but business is slow enough for her to handle it by herself, and by the time I come back from my apprenticeship I’ll have all kinds of new tricks to build up the shop.”

She picked up the jar of cinnamon, turning it back and forth in her hand as she studied its contents. “What are we making today?”

“Snickerdoodles. It’s a family recipe,” Gracia replied, “named from the Old Amestrian for ‘snail noodles,’ though they’re cinnamon-sugar cookies, not noodles, and they don’t have any snails in them.” She dug around in a drawer for a ribbon to tie back Winry’s long hair, not wanting it to fall in the dough as they worked. “They’re easy to make, as long as you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty.”

“Me?” Winry asked, standing still long enough for Gracia to tie the ribbon. She rubbed at a smudge of grease on her forearm, presumably left over from her visit to the workshop at her Granny’s house. “Never.”

Gracia hadn’t expected anything else. “Good. I’ll light the oven and we’ll go over the ingredients.”

Before long, they were settled into their routine, or as much of a routine as they’d been able to develop in the sporadic visits Winry had made to Central City since she’d begun her apprenticeship in Rush Valley. Gracia had promised Winry on the day they’d first met that she would teach her how to bake, and she’d kept that promise. It seemed absurd, sometimes, how attached she’d become to a girl she hardly ever saw, a girl Maes had brought home and invited into the family mere weeks before his death. But Gracia was never one to question the precious good things in life.

Gracia cracked two eggs into a bowl of butter and sugar and passed it over to Winry to stir. She could see the strong muscles in Winry’s forearms tighten as she worked to push the spoon through the thickening batter, and she couldn’t help admiring the girl’s strength, both physical and mental. Perhaps she herself had been too coddled as a child, given anything she could ever have wanted by doting, wealthy parents. But she couldn’t imagine having the courage, as a young teen, to move so far from home on a self-directed mission to labor day after day in a forge.

The wet ingredients mixed, Gracia began collect the dry ingredients, getting them ready so she could share the proportions necessary to make the perfect cookies. She started with the flour, dumping nearly three cups into a mixing bowl and waving away the cloud of particles it kicked up.

“What _is_ cream of tartar?” Winry asked, setting down her spoon and picking up the smallest of the canisters.

Gracia paused. There were several answers to that question, from the simplest to the most complex. At parties with other Central housewives, she might have given the simpler answer. But Winry Rockbell was an engineer. She’d appreciate a science lesson.

“It’s actually potassium bitartrate,” Gracia explained. “A crystallized byproduct of winemaking. It’s a potassium acid salt that activates the baking soda. It also helps stabilize the egg whites.”

Winry’s face perked up as she shifted her gaze to the other containers. “So how does baking soda work?” she asked.

It had been a long time since Gracia had been able to geek out over the science of baking. Maes, for all his curiosity, had never been much of a scientist. “Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, which is a natural amphoteric compound found in mineral springs and in the bile in our small intestines,” she said. “When it encounters an acid, like cream of tartar, it reacts to produce carbon dioxide, which leavens the batter so the cookies puff up and have just the right texture. Other acids will do that too, but it’s cream of tartar that creates the distinctive bite of the snickerdoodle.”

Winry nodded, looking both pleased and thoughtful. “It’s kind of like alchemy,” she mused, studying the small box of baking soda. “All of these strange chemical compounds reacting with each other to make something totally different.”

“It’s exactly like alchemy, actually. That’s why I first picked it up,” Gracia confessed.

Winry turned around, eyes wide as she looked at Gracia. “Were you an alchemist?” she asked.

Gracia laughed, measuring out spoonfuls of baking soda and cream of tartar and emptying them over the bowl of flour. “I wouldn’t say that. I… dabbled, as a teen. But I haven’t done any alchemy in at least fifteen years.”

“Why did you stop?”

Gracia bit her lip. The truth of the matter was that alchemy scared her. For all the fun she’d had turning paperclips into barrettes and reading forbidden texts in lamplight while her parents slumbered, Gracia had realized early on how dangerous a path it could become. She needed only to look at her dead husband, or the charred bodies that surely haunted Roy Mustang’s nightmares, or the poor disembodied Elric brothers, to know that she was right.

“It just wasn’t for me,” Gracia said. “I wasn’t about to become a state alchemist or anything like that, so it seemed silly to continue. I decided to take the bits I liked and apply them to baking. And science.”

Winry frowned. “Ok. But why aren’t you a scientist, then?” Then she grimaced and drew a breath through her teeth, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be nosy.”

“It’s fine,” Gracia said, adding a pinch of salt and a half a teaspoon of cinnamon to the bowl. “I did study science, in college. Chemistry. But it wasn’t easy, even ten years ago, for a woman to get into a graduate program in the sciences. I wasn’t remarkable enough.”

Winry looked down at her lap, her expression melancholy. “Oh, it’s ok,” Gracia said quickly. “It all worked out. I got a job at a bank, met Maes while I was there, and had Elysia. Everything happens for a reason.” She forced a smile onto her face, but her voice quavered audibly on her closing platitude. It wasn’t something she always succeeded at believing.

“I guess my mom was lucky,” Winry said, as she accepted the dry ingredients bowl that Gracia passed over and began to stir its contents into the earlier mixture. “She got into medical school and passed with flying colors, and she was a practicing doctor for years before I was born. Granny liked her from the minute Dad brought her home for dinner. She says she was the smartest woman she’d ever met.” Winry was staring intently into the bowl, but Gracia saw a tear leak from the corner of her eye.

“Oh, Winry,” Gracia said. “Come here. It’s ok to cry.” Gracia knew that Winry was an orphan – everyone knew the story of the Rockbells, the married doctors who had died on the Ishbalan battlefields. But Winry had never talked about her parents before.

“I’m sorry,” Winry said, tears flowing more freely as she buried her face in Gracia’s blouse. “I don’t want you to think I’m using you, Mrs. Hughes. You just remind me so much of my mom, sometimes, and…”

There were so many things Gracia wanted to say. She wanted tell Winry how honored she was to be held in the same light as such an extraordinary woman. She wanted to reassure her that she loved being a mother, and that she had more than enough love to give to an orphan who had so readily taken on Gracia’s family as her own. She wanted to say how grateful she was to know that Winry had memories of her parents at all, because it meant that her own three-year-old daughter might keep a piece of her devoted father tucked away in her heart, rather than letting him fade away completely.

In the end, she settled for holding Winry tightly to her chest and stroking her hair above the hasty ponytail. “Shhh. It’s ok. That’s what I’m here for.”

When Winry had calmed down enough to stop crying, Gracia wiped her cheeks with a washcloth and talked her through the final bit of the preparation – scooping up spoonfuls of dough, smoothing them into balls between two hands, and rolling them in a bowl of cinnamon sugar. They worked quietly, passing the balls of dough between them, and when they’d rolled the first batch and put it on a cookie sheet in the oven Winry cleared her throat.

“Mrs. Hughes, you were wrong, before.”

“Hmm?” Gracia looked up, closing the oven door as she stood.

“About not being remarkable. You are. Ever since Commodore Hughes –“ she trailed off, unwilling to use a verb. “You’ve been so together. You’ve been working and taking care of Elysia and still finding time to teach me how to bake cookies. You’ve done so much all by yourself when so many people would have broken down completely.”

Gracia shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable. She wanted to tell Winry that she was wrong. She certainly didn’t feel together. There were things she needed to do, for Elysia’s sake, but that didn’t mean her mind wasn’t haunted. It didn’t mean she didn’t have the urge to scream out her windows sometimes, to yell about how unfair the world was and curse the name of anyone who’d played a part in taking her husband away, from the military to Roy and the Elrics to Maes' still-unknown assailant. It didn’t mean she didn’t sometimes fantasize about buying a train ticket to a city far away, leaving Elysia with the nanny and starting a new life where no one would look at her with pitying eyes and offer her charity.

But this was the hand she’d been dealt, and there were still shining moments of beauty peeking through the clouds. Like Elysia. Like Winry. The two best gifts her husband had ever given her took the form of beautiful blonde children with futures full of the kind of promise she herself had never known.

“I do what I have to do,” Gracia said. “I couldn’t do less.”

“And that’s what makes you remarkable,” Winry insisted. She looked Gracia in the eye, suddenly serious. “But it’s ok for _you_ to cry, too, Mrs. Hughes. If you have to.”

Before Gracia had a chance to reply, Elysia burst into the kitchen. “Winry! I finished my puzzle!”

Winry looked at Gracia, still serious, and Gracia smiled. “Wash your hands and go. I can take care of the rest.”

“I know you can,” Winry said, and Gracia watched as her two daughters walked hand in hand into the next room.


End file.
